In Zapotec and Spanish with English subtitles, witness the exuberant Zapotec women of Juchitan in all their passionate and opinionated glory.
“In Juchitan,” says Martha Toledo, “you never feel alone. You are always surrounded by others and life isn’t taken for granted, I love that especially. Life is a constant giving and receiving and feeling identified with the Mother, with the Earth, with what you have grown.” Blossoms of Fire, in Zapotec and Spanish with English subtitles, shows the exuberant Zapotec women of Juchitan in all their passionate and opinionated glory, as they work in the marketplace, prepare enormous amounts of food, embroider their bouquets of fiery flowers, and bust stereotypes from the foreign press describing them as a promiscuous matriarchy. Here is a midwife laughing over a husband’s queasiness at a birth, a gay man cheerfully asserting that the “mothers are in charge,” and a woman taking the lead in a political protest. “I think that Juchitecan society will continue to exist and thrive,” Toledo says, “because, as our great Juchitecan poet, Gabriel Lopez Chinas said, ‘The Zapotec will only die the day the sun dies.’”
Director: Maureen Gosling
Format: DVD, color, 74 minutes.
Availability: Available for home-use or with public performance rights.
Published: 2006
Tribes/Ethnic Groups: Zapotec
